BANGOR, Maine — Parents, students and those looking to start a new career typically pore over glossy university brochures and popular magazine ratings to help them make what’s likely to be one of the most expensive decisions of their lives: where to get a college degree. Now, for the first time, a trove of new federal data sheds fresh light on the value of a college education at thousands of schools across the nation.
But many schools are crying foul on the federal report card, including several in Maine that claim it fails to accurately reflect the successes of their students.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Education and White House released the College Scorecard, part of President Barack Obama’s “continued efforts to hold colleges accountable for cost, value and quality,” according to the DOE. Students and parents have been encouraged to use it to help them decide between schools and programs.
The data shed lights on the value of a college education. Prospective students can easily get an idea of how much debt they’ll accrue and whether their degree is likely to lead to a salary high enough to pay off those loans. They can also learn what percentage of students graduate from each school and go on to earn more than a high school graduate. Or they can check out the ethnic makeup of the student body and the most popular academic programs, among other features.
But college and universities have staunchly resisted the effort. Obama originally proposed rating the nation’s schools and tying some government financial aid to their performance, aiming to expose poor performers and overpriced tuition. That prompted a backlash from higher education institutions, indignant at the prospect of being graded by the federal government.
What data should be used? Would they be reliable? How would they be presented? How could institutions with varied missions, such as state universities versus small community colleges, be compared?
The administration backed off the ratings idea and the proposal to link public funding to the results. Instead, it started building the scorecard, which leaves parents and students to make their own comparisons among schools.
Still, many colleges and universities continue to criticize the administration’s move toward accountability. In Maine, smaller niche schools say the data are unreliable and present a foggy, misleading picture of their campuses. Two points of contention: They only reflect students who borrow money from the government to pay for school, and some data present a point-in-time snapshot.
The College Scorecard includes searchable information about thousands of colleges, universities and training centers across the nation. All 27 of Maine’s higher education institutions are listed, from liberal arts schools to the University of Maine System.
Looking to earn a decent paycheck? Maine Maritime Academy students make the most compared to other Maine schools: $74,700 in median earnings annually a decade after graduating, according to the scorecard. Worried about student loans? The community colleges in Bangor and Auburn are at the head of the class on net cost, averaging less than $9,000 per year.
“This represents a huge step toward transparency in higher education,” Jonathan Rothwell, a Brookings Institution fellow who focuses on education and labor research, said.
Before the scorecard’s release, only a handful of states had publicly available data about how much students earn in the years after graduation, he said. In Maine, some earnings information was already available for public schools through the Maine’s Workforce Data Quality Initiative.
[tableau server=”public.tableau.com” workbook=”Maineschoolcomparisondata” view=”Earningsmap?:showVizHome=no” tabs=”no” toolbar=”yes” revert=”” refresh=”” linktarget=”” width=“100%” height=“550px”][/tableau]
The scorecard provides a glimpse at which schools are keeping their students on track and which ones are falling short, Rothwell said. Still, even proponents admit there are “weaknesses” in the data based on what information could be obtained consistently across most U.S. campuses.
If the Maine Community College System were grading the scorecard, “we’d give it an incomplete,” spokeswoman Helen Pelletier said.
‘Premier career college’
Bangor-based Beal College prides itself on getting students into in-demand careers in fields looking for workers: welding and law enforcement, for example. One of Beal’s primary focuses is to serve as “the region’s premier career college,” according to its vision statement.
But the private, for-profit campus that specializes in two-year associate degree programs performed poorly on the new scorecard. Beal College, according to the data, graduates fewer than 40 percent of its students, and most of its graduates earn less than a person with just a high school diploma.
Rothwell described Beal’s performance on the scorecard as “terrible.”
On the upside, the school had among the lowest annual cost of attendance figures in the state, coming in as slightly more expensive than the state’s community colleges.
“If a student isn’t successful, we’re not going to be successful — and we shouldn’t be,” Allen Stehle, Beal College’s president, said. “We shouldn’t be in business if we can’t satisfy people’s need for employment.”
Bangor police Officer Dan Sanborn was looking for a career change in 2005 and turned to Beal’s law enforcement program.
“I went to college at 31 years old. I wasn’t sure about sitting in a large classroom setting with a bunch of younger people,” Sanborn said.
The Bangor Police Department hired him a month before he graduated in 2007 and sent him off to the police academy to complete his training.
“I had an awesome experience at Beal,” Sanborn said, adding that he was pleased with the affordable education he received.
The charts and numbers that came out of the College Scorecard don’t reveal the full picture, according to Stehle. For example, Beal College asserts a 73 percent job placement rate for its 2014 graduates, a rate well above the 60 percent job placement threshold required to maintain accreditation for its programs, he said. Those statistics don’t mesh with the 40 percent graduation rate claimed by the College Scorecard. Schools can’t count a student in their job placement calculations if that student didn’t receive a degree.
How can the numbers be so far off?
The answers lie in how the federal government assembled its report card.
The scorecard’s limitations
The Brookings Institution encourages students and parents who dig into the new data to compare similar institutions wherever possible. It does little good to compare Bowdoin College’s results with those of the University of Maine at Fort Kent or a school focused on job training, its experts say.
The new data provide only a snapshot of school performance. They look at attendance cost and class size from 2013 and only at earning figures for students who received federal student aid and graduated a decade ago.
The share of students who rely on federal aid, such as Perkins loans and Pell Grants, varies widely from campus to campus. For example, about three-quarters of Beal College students received federal loans in 2013. At some schools that serve many low-income students, it could be 90 percent of the student body or more. At others, such as prestigious national universities, it could be fewer than 10 percent.
Schools with higher percentages of those recipients have a more accurate picture of what students earn in the years after graduation. Those figures, based on IRS data, also include former students who are unemployed by choice, including stay-at-home parents, and count against the school’s median earnings.
The earnings figures also average all students with no distinction among degrees. A student who earned a four-year bachelor’s degree in engineering is lumped in with another who chose a two-year associate degree in art history.
Finally, the graduation rate for each school only counts students who are attending college for the first time and are enrolled full time. This means any student who attended any college at one point but had to stop because of family or financial reasons or transferred to a different school is left out. Schools with large contingents of nontraditional students or those enrolled part time while working — such as a community college or one focused on career training — are more likely to have much lower graduation rate calculations.
[tableau server=”public.tableau.com” workbook=”Maineschoolcomparisondata” view=”Costmap?:showVizHome=no” tabs=”no” toolbar=”yes” revert=”” refresh=”” linktarget=”” width=”100%” height=”550px”][/tableau]
Other problems have been revealed since the data’s release, with independent reviews finding some of the graduation data is off by an average of 10, and as much as 59, percentage points, according to U.S. News & World Report.
The U.S. Department of Education states that the data are “exploratory” and “not intended to be viewed uncritically as accurate estimates of institutions’ causal effects on earnings.”
In his Sept. 12 weekly radio address, Obama said, “We’ll continue to improve the scorecard based on what we learn from students, parents, counselors and colleges themselves. The goal is to help everybody who’s willing to work for a higher education search for and select a college that fits their goals.”
Maine schools go on the defensive
Some smaller Maine schools condemn the data based on their limitations, saying the measures fail to reflect the differing missions or strengths of schools. But others recognize the value, especially to the scores of Maine residents eager to learn while working and supporting families.
“The information presented in the College Scorecard is flawed at the outset and presents an inaccurate picture of many colleges and universities,” argued Rob Levin, communications director at College of the Atlantic, a private school focused on human ecology and situated on a pristine campus in Bar Harbor.
That school, according to the data, had a relatively high annual cost of attendance of $21,972. But students’ median annual salary 10 years after graduation is $27,000, about $7,300 less than the national average.
Because College of the Atlantic has just 350 students and only 30 percent received Pell Grants in 2013, the data are not representative of the school’s performance, Levin argued.
About 25 percent of College of the Atlantic students go on to graduate school after earning their degree and 65 percent land a job in their field of study, according to the school.
Using a different methodology, U.S. News and World Report recently listed COA as having the 11th best value among liberal arts colleges in the nation, based on cost of attendance and available aid.
Also critical of the data are Maine’s community colleges.
“The scorecard has the potential to be a valuable tool for students and families, but in its current form, it’s a fuzzy snapshot of all of higher education, not a high-definition picture of any one institution,” Pelletier, spokeswoman for the Maine Community College System, said.
Community colleges traditionally graduate fewer students than four-year institutions. Their graduation rates in Maine range from 18 percent to 46 percent. But some community college students have taken courses at other institutions or aren’t attending full time, so the scorecard ignores them.
MCCS also takes issue with the post-graduation earnings data. When reviewing potential earnings for programs at its schools, community colleges and the University of Maine System more often look to the Maine Department of Labor, which developed the Maine Workforce Data Quality Initiative. That includes data about post-graduation earnings that vary dramatically from the scorecard data.
Contrary to the College Scorecard, it shows students graduating with an associate degree from community colleges earn at least $5,000 more per year in their first job than a student with a high school diploma.
The University of Maine System saw mixed results. Its flagship school in Orono slightly exceeded national averages for earnings while burdening students with less debt, but smaller campuses — especially the campuses in Machias and Augusta — struggled with low graduation rates and post-graduation earnings, according to the scorecard.
“Traditional, four-year institutions like UMaine and the University of Maine at Farmington measure up very well in the College Scorecard methodology,” Dan Demeritt, UMS spokesman, said. “The story behind the scorecard is the importance of serving every Maine learner, including the many degree seekers who cannot move into a residence hall and carry the credit load it takes to graduate in four years.”
At Beal College, Stehle stressed his efforts to ensure that the programs stay affordable and offer students a good return on their investment. Stehle said a two-year degree at Beal costs $7,000 per year, but expenses and debt stack up when students take out additional loans to support their living costs while attending classes.
Stehle said he’s unsure why the scorecard claims low average post-graduation earnings of $25,300, calling the statistic “surprising.”
Even using the scorecard’s earnings data, Beal students’ first-year earnings are three times higher than their total school debt for Pell Grant recipients and 1.8 times higher for all students, he said.
“I will go down swinging on this one, because I know we bring value to the equation,” Stehle said.
Follow Nick McCrea on Twitter at @nmccrea213.